Skip to main content

How Words are Formed



Six women arrive at the table. Cup remnants of
waking dreams in crowded, dissipating wisps,
faceless characters and confusing maps. We arrive to decipher
together, mouth groggy snippets over biscuits and bacon.

Outside, snow that could just sigh. We've returned to our
previous seats. Forks placed to the left or tossed collectively
into the center. 

Last night we drank at this table, over Scrabble tiles.
Making up rules. This morning, one early riser

emerges from the day's weather. Sock monkey with down
on her brown cap. 

We start a new game.

Acronyms are not acceptable, we decide. Directions 
no where to be found. I slowly stir my drink.

Another undresses 
to hot tub on this vacation patch of
Colorado cottonwood and pine. 
Red cars turn white
in the driveway. We reach for the names and 
favorite
sayings of bygone partners as if a clue inside. How we
arrived here.

Fortunes scripted on our tea bags.  One continues
to whip farm fresh eggs.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing  to certain bards in the back room, entering through  the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized  Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named  his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence   Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet   Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and  a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the fr...

Grit and Sunlight

What springs up: insistence in this persistent                                                 mother of mine (still breathing) Even busy ashes     from a rescued urn float up reconstituted as morning dew   She unfolds her tendril arms from shadow     (shaking just five days ago as if in temporary surrender)   (that moment when I am less certain of her longevity) this woman ever present     (anyone’s mother)    aging    when even the most spindly clover of her fragile skin                         captures the sunrise light like   anticipation’s shower   ...

Shameless Early Promotion

My poetry book, The Fiction of Stillness, is available for pre-order now on Barnes and Noble. Official release date August 1st, 2024. Here's a taste: ... The table is smooth and round              symmetric         The chairs are haphazardly placed at the end of this day      I have breast cancer I say into the receiver   [communities must] pool resources   How to produce the sounds of the imaging                report into sentences that resonate with months of postponement weighty contrast on my right side   computing and comparing IM ratios for greater insight                          not sufficient to prove the efficacy of screening   ...